10 Legacy Cloud Considerations

What is the state of your cloud application?

Working with clients over the past twelve years, I’ve seen cloud services evolve more quickly than knowledge about how best to use them. To that end, my recent contracts have involved more and more modernization work of legacy cloud applications. We discover common opportunities for improvement across many of these applications.

Discover the current state in appropriate detail via patterned inquiry .

Answers to a standard set of questions allow us to assess, prioritize and determine how to update legacy cloud applications effectively. To that end, I’ll share our top 10 considerations (as groups of questions) in this article.

First: Practices

• Who is your dev team? — who has what access to your cloud projects?
• Where is the Dev project? Where is Prod? Do you ‘dev-in-prod’?
• How do you make infra changes — by clicking in the console?
• Where is your application source code?
• Do you have any infra scripts? — are they checked in to source control
• Have you had any unplanned downtime? — when? how long?
• Do you have key user stories?

Second: Data

• Where is your data? In buckets? SQL, NoSQL?